Wayne's World: Years of hard effort revived fading eagle species

The bald eagle is an oh-my-gosh, hallelujah, ain't-nature- great predator with a mighty 7- to 8-foot wingspan.

But we almost lost them a scant 40 years ago this year.

Just one pair of bald eagles was left in all of New York state in 1973.

They lived up an 85-foot-tall red oak tree on a steep hill in back of Hemlock Lake near Rochester trying to have babies like crazy.

The then commonly used pesticide DDT (now banned in the U.S.) polluted their eggs.

The persistent pesticide made eagle eggs so thin shelled, said a federal scientist, “that they'd crack by the touch of the fingers.”

Eagle numbers crashed.

Imagine losing these huge birds. When they glide past the sun their wings often shine with a golden glow.

“Virtually all the eagles were gone in the northeast,” says the now-retired biologist Peter Nye, the man who led the charge to bring back these great predators.

It's worth remembering the massive eagle restoration effort Nye led as head of the state Department of Environmental Conservation's endangered species unit.

His eagle recovery team is the reason we're going to see lots of winter eagles throng the Delaware and Hudson rivers this month, and why these eagles will nest in good numbers across New York this early spring.

Using the power of the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act, Nye's team of tree-climbing, all-weather trackers and patient observers saved our eagles. Their daring plan began in 1976 and took 13 years to finish.

They gambled that very young eagles from other states – healthy, pesticide free birds – could be hand raised in New York rearing platforms by human hands hidden from view.

In fact, these eaglets did believe they were being raised by eagle parents.

Not only was that a roaring success, but something magnificent happened, a sort of wildlife omen, Nye say.

Remarkably, when the first two of those hand-raised eagles, a brother and sister, were released they did what most eagles do. They flew their own ways.

But almost incredibly, says Nye, they met up four years later and nested together near Watertown, raising the first wild young in many years.

He was shocked.

“These were the first two we released (after hand-rearing them) and the idea that they survived and then found each other four years later and then bred is pretty remarkable.” That's so unlikely, he adds, because eagles “just don't stay together when they're young and they go whenever they want to go.”

“This was almost a message from God, this is good stuff, and this is going to work, keep it up boys.”

Not only that, but the baby eagles hand raised in New York came from relatively DDT-free places like Alaska, Wisconsin and even Nova Scotia. So new eagle DNA was pumped into our birds. And they got going.

As of 2010, New York eagles produced 244 fledgling eagles. They'll all live to be 30 or so years old if they're lucky.

We saw a turnaround quicker than we anticipated,” says DEC recovery team member Mike Allen. “The eagles show the resilience of the natural world.”

So our eagles came roaring back, wild-eyed, hook-billed and ready to soar into the heavens and zoom across tree tops flying upside down and tumbling through the skies, talons often locked with those of another eagle.